'Till date, we have served around 5,000 clients and have completed nearly 10,000 projects,' says Abhishek Rungta.

Starting with a measly Rs 50, Abhishek Rungta has expanded his website designing and hosting business to Rs 40 crore through perseverence and passion in less than two decades.

I belong to a family of Kolkata-based businessmen. However, when I decided to start my own venture—an e-mail service centre—I received their support and encouragement. This was in 1997 and the Internet was a relatively new concept.

The centre was supposed to facilitate communication between businesses and their customers through mass mailers sent via the Net. I took a loan of Rs 46,000 from my family, paying around Rs 30,000 to an Internet service provider and the rest going into the purchase of a modem. I didn’t need to buy a computer as I had one.

Unfortunately, the service provider shut down his business and absconded with my money. However, this did not deter me and I thought of starting something that would not require heavy capital infusion. I started visiting tech expos with the aim of meeting people and building contacts.

I observed that people were generating a lot of business by setting up outlets at these expos. Since I was familiar with website designing, I decided to rent a stall at one such expo. A three-day lease for the stall cost Rs6,000. I did not have this amount.

So, I agreed to take a small part of the stall and share the remaining space with another person who was selling modems. I advertised my website designing service via handbills and it cost me Rs 50. The brand name was decided on the spot, and this is how Indus Net Technologies was born.

At the expo, just one other company was offering website designing, but since their services were at a premium, more people came to my stall. In the three days that the expo lasted, I managed to bag two projects worth Rs 20,000. Both the clients paid 50 per cent of the fee upfront.

I also helped the person who was sharing the stall sell his modems. As a mark of appreciation for helping him with his sales, he paid my share of the rent as well. Since I was a commerce graduate, I had to conduct a lot of research and read up several books on computer to manage my business. Meanwhile, I started getting several inquiries on Web-hosting services.

I found out that there were just a couple of players in the field and they were charging an exorbitant amount for providing the service. I managed to contact an Italian company that was offering Web-hosting services at 20 per cent the fee Indian companies were charging.

I even managed to convince them to give me three months’ credit for offering their service in India. The new service significantly boosted my business and by the end of 1997-98 the firm’s turnover stood at Rs 1 lakh. Soon I started employing people to market the business.

I took a small place on lease at Dalhousie Square in Kolkata to serve as office. In the same year, I completed my bachelor’s degree in commerce and decided to pursue a one-year programme in multimedia from the US. I handed over the charge of my business to my sister for the period I was away. When I returned in September 2000, I found huge hoardings of dotcom companies outside the airport.

I realised that several players had entered the market to cash in on the dotcom boom while I was gone. Clearly, I had been left behind. I decided to focus on Web designing as too many players had crowded the Web-hosting market and we had lost the competitive edge in the field. In the first few months after my return, the firm did not generate any business.

While I was studying in the US, I had done a small freelance Web designing project for a company based in the UK for around £2,000. I thought of approaching global customers rather than just sitting idle waiting for an opportunity in the Indian market.

I registered myself on social media sites to build global business contacts. By the end of 2000, work started coming my way once again. By 2002, the firm’s turnover crossed Rs 15 lakh. By the end of 2007, it burgeoned to around Rs 6 crore.

In the same year, we launched a digital marketing division and moved to a bigger office in Kolkata. We also set up another office in Chennai. Currently, we offer various services, including digital marketing, Cloud and Web application development and enterprise mobility. Last year, Indus Net Technologies registered a turnover of Rs 40 crore.

We now have over 200 clients across the services spectrum and the firm employs around 500 people. Till date, we have served around 5,000 clients and have completed nearly 10,000 projects. In the next financial year (2015-16), we aim to achieve a revenue target of Rs 60 crore. Besides the focus on global clients, we are now planning to expand our customer base by targeting services for companies based in India.

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